Whispers (51 page)

“That's right.” She had a pleasant, gentle, melodic voice. “Who's this?”

“My name's Joshua Rhinehart. I'm calling from St. Helena. I'm the executor for the estate of the late Bruno Frye.”

She didn't respond.

“Mrs. Yancy?”

“You mean he's dead?” she asked.

“You didn't know?”

“How would I know?”

“It was in the newspapers.”

“I never read the papers,” she said. Her voice had changed. It was not pleasant any more; it was hard and cold.

“He died last Thursday,” Joshua said.

She was silent.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“What do you want from me?”

“Well, as executor, one of my duties is to see that all of Mr. Frye's debts are paid before the estate is distributed to the heirs.”

“So?”

“I discovered that Mr. Frye was paying you five hundred dollars a month, and I thought that might be installments on a debt of some sort.”

She didn't answer him.

He could hear her breathing.

“Mrs. Yancy?”

“He doesn't owe me a penny,” she said.

“Then he wasn't repaying a debt?”

“No,” she said.

“Were you working for him in some capacity?”

She hesitated. Then:
click!

“Mrs. Yancy?”

There wasn't any response. Just the hissing of the long distance line, a far-off crackle of static.

Joshua dialed her number again.

“Hello,” she said.

“It's me, Mrs. Yancy. Evidently, we were cut off.”

He considered calling her a third time, but he decided she would only hang up again. She wasn't handling herself well. Obviously, she had a secret, a secret she had shared with Bruno, and now she was trying to hide it from Joshua. But all she had done was feed his curiosity. He was more certain than ever that each of the people who were paid through the San Francisco bank account would have something to tell him that would help to explain the existence of a Bruno Frye look-alike.

If he could only get them to talk, he might settle the estate relatively quickly after all.

As he put the receiver down, he said, “You can't get away from me that easily, Rita.”

Tomorrow, he would fly the Cessna down to Hollister and confront her in person.

Now he called Dr. Nicholas Rudge, got an answering service, and left a message, including both his home and office numbers.

On his third call, he struck paydirt, although not as much of it as he had hoped to find. Latham Hawthorne was at home and willing to talk. The occultist had a nasal voice and a trace of an upper-class British accent.

“I sold him quite a number of books,” Hawthorne said in answer to a question from Joshua.

“Just books?”

“That's correct.”

“That's a lot of money for books.”

“He was an excellent customer.”

“But a hundred and thirty thousand dollars?”

“Spread out over almost five years.”

“Nevertheless—”

“And most of them were extremely rare books, you understand.”

“Would you be willing to buy them back from the estate?” Joshua asked, trying to determine if the man was honest.

“Buy them back? Oh, yes, I'd be happy to do that. Most definitely.”

“How much?”

“Well, I can't say exactly until I see them.”

“Take a stab in the dark. How much?”

“You see, if the volumes have been abused—tattered and torn and marked and whatnot—then that's quite another story.”

“Let's say they're spotless. How much would you offer?”

“If they're in the condition they were when I sold them to Mr. Frye, I'm prepared to offer you quite a bit more than he originally paid for them. A great many of the titles in his collection have appreciated in value.”

“How much?” Joshua asked.

“You're a persistent man.”

“One of my many virtues. Come on, Mr. Hawthorne. I'm not asking you to commit yourself to a binding offer. Just an estimate.”

“Well,
if
the collection still contains every book that I sold him, and
if
they're all in prime condition . . . I'd say . . . allowing for my margin of profit, of course . . . around two hundred thousand dollars.”

“You'd buy back the same books for seventy thousand more than he paid you?”

“As a rough estimate, yes.”

“That's quite an increase in value.”

“That's because of the area of interest,” Hawthorne said. “More and more people come into the field every day.”

“And what is the field?” Joshua asked. “What kind of books was he collecting?”

“Haven't you seen them?”

“I believe they're on bookshelves in his study,” Joshua said. “Many of them are very old books, and a lot of them have leather bindings. I didn't realize there was anything unusual about them. I haven't taken time to look closely.”

“They were occult titles,” Hawthorne said. “I only sell books dealing with the occult in all its many manifestations. A high percentage of my wares are forbidden books, those that were banned by church or state in another age, those that have not been brought back into print by our modern and skeptical publishers. Limited edition items, too. I have more than two hundred steady customers. One of them is a San Jose gentleman who collects nothing but books on Hindu mysticism. A woman in Marin County has acquired an enormous library on Satanism, including a dozen obscure titles that have been published in no language but Latin. Another woman in Seattle has bought virtually every word ever printed about out-of-body experiences. I can satisfy any taste. I'm not merely polishing my ego when I say that I'm the most reputable and reliable dealer in occult literature in this country.”

“But surely not all of your customers spend as much as Mr. Frye did.”

“Oh, of course not. There are only two or three others like him, with his resources. But I've got a few dozen clients who budget approximately ten thousand dollars a year for their purchases.”

“That's incredible,” Joshua said.

“Not really,” Hawthorne said. “These people feel that they are teetering on the edge of a great discovery, on the brink of learning some monumental secret, the riddle of life. Some of them are in pursuit of immortality. And some are searching for spells and rituals that will bring them tremendous wealth or unlimited power over others. Those are persuasive motivations. If they truly believe that just a little more forbidden knowledge will get them what they want, then they will pay virtually any price to obtain it.”

Joshua swung around in his swivel chair and looked out the window. Low gray clouds were scudding in from the west, over the tops of the autumn-somber Mayacamas Mountains, bearing down on the valley.

“Exactly what aspect of the occult interested Mr. Frye?” Joshua asked.

“He collected two kinds of books loosely linked to the same general subject,” Hawthorne said. “He was fascinated by the possibility of communicating with the dead. Séances, table knockings, spirit voices, ectoplasmic apparitions, amplification of ether recordings, automatic writing, that sort of thing. But his greatest interest, by far, lay in literature about the living dead.”

“Vampires?” Joshua asked, thinking about the strange letter in the safe-deposit box.

“Yes,” Hawthorne said. “Vampires, zombies, creatures of that sort. He couldn't get enough books on the subject. Of course, I don't mean that he was interested in horror novels and cheap sensationalism. He collected only serious nonfiction studies—and certain select esoterica.”

“Such as?”

“Well, for instance . . . in the esoterica category . . . he paid six thousand dollars for the hand-written journal of Christian Marsden.”

“Who is Christian Marsden?” Joshua asked.

“Fourteen years ago, Marsden was arrested for the murders of nine people in and around San Francisco. The press called him the Golden Gate Vampire because he always drank his victim's blood.”

“Oh, yes,” Joshua said.

“And he also dismembered his victims.”

“Yes.”

“Cut off their arms and legs and heads.”

“Unfortunately, I remember him now. A gruesome case,” Joshua said.

The dirty gray clouds were still rolling across the western mountains, moving steadily toward St. Helena.

“Marsden kept a journal during his year-long killing spree,” Hawthorne said. “It's a curious piece of work. He believed that a dead man named Adrian Trench was trying to take over his body and come back to life through him. Marsden genuinely felt that he was in a constant, desperate struggle for control of his own flesh.”

“So that when he killed, it wasn't really him killing, but this Adrian Trench.”

“That's what he wrote in his journal,” Hawthorne said. “For some reason he never explained, Marsden believed that the evil spirit of Adrian Trench required other people's blood to keep control of Marsden's body.”

“A sufficiently screwy story to present to a court in a sanity hearing,” Joshua said cynically.

“Marsden
was
sent to an asylum,” Hawthorne said. “Six years later, he died there. But he wasn't faking insanity to escape a prison sentence. He actually believed that the spirit of Adrian Trench was trying to cast him out of his own body.”

“Schizophrenic.”

“Probably,” Hawthorne agreed. “But I don't think we should rule out the possibility that Marsden was sane and that he was merely reporting a genuine paranormal phenomenon.”

“Say again?”

“I'm suggesting that Christian Marsden might really have been possessed in some way or other.”

“You don't mean that,” Joshua said.

“To paraphrase Shakespeare—there are a great many things in heaven and earth that we do not and cannot understand.”

Beyond the large office window, as the slate-colored bank of clouds continued to press into the valley, the sun sank westward, beyond the Mayacamas, and the autumn dusk came prematurely to St. Helena.

As he watched the light bleed slowly out of day, Joshua said, “Why did Mr. Frye want the Marsden journal so badly?”

“He believed he was living through an experience similar to Marsden's,” Hawthorne said.

“You mean, Bruno thought some dead person was trying to take over his body?”

“No,” Hawthorne said. “He didn't identify with Marsden, but with Marsden's victims. Mr. Frye believed that his mother—I think her name was Katherine—had come back from the dead in someone else's body and was plotting to kill him. He hoped that the Marsden journal would give him a clue about how to deal with her.”

Joshua felt as if a large dose of ice-cold water had been injected into his veins. “Bruno never mentioned such a thing to me.”

“Oh, he was quite secretive about it,” Hawthorne said. “I'm probably the only person he ever revealed it to. He trusted me because I was sympathetic toward his interest in the occult. Even so, he only mentioned it once. He was quite passionate in his belief that she had returned from the dead, quite terrified of falling prey to her. But later, he was sorry that he had told me.”

Joshua sat up straight in his chair, amazed, chilled. “Mr. Hawthorne, last week Mr. Frye attempted to kill a woman in Los Angeles.”

“Yes, I know.”

“He wanted to kill her because he thought that she was actually his mother hiding in a new body.”

“Really? How interesting.”

“Good God, sir! You knew what was going on in his mind. Why didn't you do something?”

Hawthorne remained cool and serene. “What would you have had me do?”

“You could have told the police! They could have questioned him, looked into the possibility that he needed medical attention.”

“Mr. Frye hadn't committed a crime,” Hawthorne said. “And beyond that, you're presuming he was crazy, and I make no such presumption.”

“You're joking,” Joshua said incredulously.

“Not at all. Perhaps Frye's mother did come back from the grave to get him. Maybe she even succeeded.”

“For God's sake, that woman in Los Angeles was not his mother!”

“Maybe,” Hawthorne said. “Maybe not.”

Although Joshua was still sitting in his big office chair, and although the chair was still resting squarely on a solid floor, he felt curiously off balance. He had pictured Hawthorne as a rather cultured, mild-mannered, bookish fellow who had gotten into his unusual line of business largely because of the profits it offered. Now Joshua began to wonder if that image was altogether wrong. Maybe Latham Hawthorne was as strange as the merchandise he sold.

“Mr. Hawthorne, you're obviously a very efficient and successful businessman. You sound as if you're well-educated. You're far more articulate than most people I meet these days. Considering all of that, I find it difficult to believe that you put much credence in such things as séances and mysticism and the living dead.”

“I scoff at nothing,” Hawthorne said. “And in fact I think my willingness to believe is less surprising than your stubborn refusal to do so. I don't see how an intelligent man can
not
realize that there are many worlds beyond our own, realities beyond that in which we live.”

“Oh, I believe the world is filled with mysteries and that we only partially perceive the nature of reality,” Joshua said. “You'll get no argument from me on that. But I also think, in time, our perceptions will be sharpened and the mysteries all explained by scientists, by rational men working in their laboratories—not by superstitious cultists burning incense and chanting nonsense.”